Listen, there is only one single method that counts: #1. Forget everything you've heard about search engine indexing. Concentrate all your efforts on publishing fresh content and acquiring related inbound links to your content pages instead.

Link out to valuable pages within the body text and ask for a backlink. Keep your outbound links up, even if you don't get a link back. Add a web links page to each content page and use it to trade links on the content page's topic. Don't bother with home page link exchanges.

Ignore tricky 'backdoor' advice. There is no such thing as a backdoor to a search engine's index. Open your front door widely for the engines by actively developing deep inbound links. Once you're indexed and ranked fairly, fine tune your search engine spider support.

Joking. You can't store milk and cookies on your server's hard disk, and although M$ likes $$ pretty much, the M$ crawler doesn't index your site faster when it finds bold dollar signs.
I've added this footnote, because a few days after publishing this article I discovered that some webmasters make use of the '$$-trick'.